A Good House (8 page)

After they’d peeled the potatoes and got them started, she took off her apron, mixed a rye and water for herself and a rye and coke for Bill, and went into the living room to sit with him. They talked about nothing in particular for a few minutes and then she asked if maybe Patrick and Paul and Murray should take the bed back upstairs. Bill called the boys into the living room and asked them to do it, please, and he and Margaret watched them take the bed apart and carry it back up to their parents’ bedroom, where they would reassemble it.

Margaret didn’t mention Sylvia’s side of the closet because Bill’s mother had said that she and her friend Phyllis would attend to that. She’d said Phyllis had a sister in Toronto who was close to Sylvia’s size.

Margaret had intended to stay just long enough to clean every inch of the emptied living room but when she was half finished Daphne led her to the table where a place had been set for her. After supper the boys returned the foldaway cot to the McKellars, and when Margaret was finished in the living room, they emptied the hall and put the furniture back where they thought it had always been.

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September, Patrick and Murray left for university. The previous spring, just before Patrick truly believed that his mother was going to die, when Murray and everyone else were sending in their applications, he had sent in his own, on the sly, consulting no one. His grade-thirteen year hadn’t been his best, he knew that, but he didn’t expect to fail anything either. They had written their exams, nine subjects for everyone, in the sweating heat of the June gym, and then they’d had to wait out the summer because the marking was not done by their own teachers but by anonymous markers in Toronto. In August when he got his results, and they were just high enough, he told Murray what he’d done. They had driven out to the lake. They were sitting in Murray’s new hardtop Chev on the Casino hill with their transcripts open in their laps. Patrick said he must have been something less than human to be making plans for his future when his mother was dying.

Murray had got straight A’s and this meant a substantial government scholarship to start him off. The next evening at his parents’
dining-room table he directed the conversation in such a way that his mother was prompted to ask how Patrick Chambers had done and where was he planning to go?

A few days later Alex McFarlane came to Bill at the hardware store to say that he and Mrs. McFarlane would like to help Patrick out with some of the money they had put aside years ago for Murray. His little remaining hair was snow white and he had put on a suit to make his proposal. He said they had always regarded their university fund as money to be invested in the next generation, and now that Murray would be needing less of it, they didn’t really want to waste it on anything else. He said they’d been south once for a winter holiday and hadn’t found it all that appealing, the traffic, the humidity, the exorbitant cost of a hotel room. He said, “You’ve had a hard time here and I wish you would accept this as a gesture of our respect for Patrick and for you, and particularly, of course, for Sylvia.”

Bill accepted the money on Patrick’s behalf. Since Sylvia’s death, one of the hardest questions he had been asking himself was how could he make sure the kids established themselves the way she would have wanted. That night when he sat Patrick down to tell him about Alex McFarlane’s visit, he explained to him that such money didn’t come freely. He said the onus would be on him some time later in his life to give over an equivalent amount to some other young person, someone whose potential was not matched by his circumstances. He said that was the way these things worked and that it was a private matter, not to be bandied about. He said Patrick might want to think about a small gift, a token of appreciation, likely something for Mrs. McFarlane. He said maybe Margaret could help with that.

After Patrick got his next paycheque from the feed mill, he went up to Margaret’s apartment to tell her what his father had advised him to do and to hand her a twenty-dollar bill. The next day on her lunch hour she went over to Taylor’s Fine China and found a lovely crystal rose bowl. She told Patrick she thought it would be appropriate because Mrs. McFarlane had a large garden and people said she was especially proud of her roses. She wrapped the bowl for him at the kitchen table in muted, all-occasion paper and when he asked
her if he should get dressed up to take it over she told him, “No, you’re fine as you are.”

Even after getting the answer he wanted and borrowing Margaret’s Pontiac to drive over to McFarlane’s, Patrick wished he hadn’t asked her for help. He had no idea how this consulting Margaret business had got started. Before their mother died they hardly even knew her and now she was supposed to be the one to ask. It wasn’t that she was around too much, she only did what they wanted her to do and they appreciated it, it was that she was always ready to be around. Just sitting somewhere, ready.

Mrs. McFarlane came to the front door. She told Patrick that Mr. McFarlane had decided that morning to make a trip into Toronto, so he wasn’t home. But because she knew what this was about, she invited him in and sat him down on the brocade sofa in her living room and brought him a bottle of Coke. She asked if maybe she should unwrap the present on her own. Patrick told her sure, why not.

She was very careful with the paper and the ribbon, and when she had the bowl unwrapped she held it in both hands up to the light coming in from the wide hall. She was very pleased. He had never seen a woman so pleased. “I saw this up there,” she said, “and you know I almost bought it. Imagine.” She set it carefully on the table in front of her. “I bet this is Margaret’s doing,” she said. “Your father has such a friend in Margaret.”

The first week of September Patrick and Murray loaded up the hardtop Chev to make the move into London. Bill and Daphne and Paul followed in Bill’s car, which was equally loaded. The university campus, thought to be one of the country’s most beautiful, was spread with casual grace across fifty rolling acres at the edge of the city and set off from the city by high stone gates. The large sandstone college buildings with their bell towers, costly replications of British institutional architecture, had been distributed with precision, set carefully on the green hills like medieval jewels.

The boys soon found their separate residences and Bill and Daphne and Paul helped them carry their belongings up the stairs to their rooms. Both buildings were crawling with parents and boys
hauling suitcases and boxes, the boys eager to be left on their own, the parents not very anxious to go. Some of the most reluctant parents had to be patiently shoved out of rooms and guided down the stairs to their cars.

Just before he started down, Bill turned to face Patrick. “This is an opportunity I myself didn’t have,” he said. “You be sure to make the best of it.”

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home, Daphne and Paul learned to cook. They could each do a good omelette and sausages and chops, although they never risked a roast and there were always potatoes, mashed or warmed-up mashed or fried, and pale green peas from a can or string beans or creamed corn. Paul, unaccountably, taught himself how to make pastry, went up to Clarke’s for cans of cherry pie filling. They discovered him more than once rolling out pastry on Sylvia’s marble board, his damp face smeared with flour.

The pages of Sylvia’s cookbook, a large standard volume stuffed with all kinds of loose recipes in all manner of strange handwriting, were interspersed with a dozen black-and-white pictures of trim, energetic housewives. All of the housewives smiled big smiles and had short, tidy hair with crisp, crimped waves and narrow, belted waists and open-toed shoes and, flowing from their mouths, dialogue bubbles filled with handy household tips, their tried-and-true solutions for the persistent problem of small, unwanted visitors in the flour and the oatmeal, for mildew in basements, and for those noisy cupboard doors that can disturb a peaceful household.

Some of the book’s pages were stained and many of the margins were filled with Sylvia’s own handwriting, cryptic notes she’d made to herself. Often she had devised variations or substitutions. On some pages there was a check mark or a question mark, sometimes a warning to herself: Careful when doubling, or, Sounds better than it is, or, Everyone hated this, except Bill, who maybe just didn’t want to say. On some pages a name had been written in the margin and firmly underlined.

Standing over the stove after school started that September, absent-mindedly stirring a soup that had been dropped off by her
grandmother, Daphne leafed through the pages, looking for her own name. She eventually found it beside the recipe for Sea Foam Icing: Daphne, it said. Birthdays and other.

Margaret did not impose herself. She left them more or less alone to sort things out, calling only occasionally to ask if there was anything extra that needed to be done or to say that she was going over the border and did anyone need socks, underwear, khakis? The first time she was invited for a meal she hadn’t prepared, she restrained herself, behaved as a guest would, graciously accepting Daphne’s no when she asked if she could help with the dishes.

She didn’t work with Bill at the hardware now. She had accepted an offer to cross the street to the pharmacy, where she was paid a substantially higher wage to keep a set of books that were not much more complicated than the hardware books. Bill told her he hated to see her go but he wasn’t the guy in charge so he couldn’t do anything about raising her pay.

As a going-away gift he gave her a pearl cluster brooch that he’d found nestled in cotton batting in a small blue box in Sylvia’s dresser. When Margaret asked, he had to say he had no idea how Sylvia had come to have it.

Six weeks after the supper when she didn’t wash the dishes, Bill and Margaret began to meet at the Blue Moon for their coffee breaks, sitting always in one of the smaller booths at the back. Sometimes they met for lunch, BLTs or soup of the day.

When it became clear to the wits that Bill had abandoned them, one of them told him in what passes in men for a whisper, “Just don’t be too long about it. We can’t guarantee your spot forever.” It was the first joke anyone had directed at Bill in a long time. They all recognized a possibility when they saw one and they could see no purpose in his trying to continue on alone with those kids. None of them could have done it.

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January, after one of Margaret’s roast beef dinners, Bill asked everyone to stay around because he wanted to talk to them. Patrick and Murray were home for the weekend. Patrick had been coming home regularly, picking up every hour he could get at the feed mill.
Supper had been conversational, lively. The boys were full of talk. Classes were indeed huge, professors were indeed weird, jocks thought they ruled the campus and were pretty much correct. No one bothered much with small-town boys.

Bill had not bought Margaret a diamond because she told him she would be happier with just the one ring, but the kids all knew what was coming and Bill knew they knew. He said the words he had decided to say, careful not to show any undue affection to Margaret, who sat across from him. He mentioned the word “mother” several times and, near the end of his very short speech, the words “make a life.”

He understood that what he was about to do would be seen by some as too big a change too soon, or worse, just plain selfish, as if he was thinking mainly about himself. He had tried to prepare Margaret for a bit of resistance because he believed the kids were entitled to it, although he couldn’t guess how their resistance might show itself. When they only nodded and tried to smile, each nod around the table an indication to him that they were ready to offer up the hardest gift they had ever been asked to give, before he’d even felt it coming he had made a private, lifelong promise to each of them, separately.

He had made his decision about Margaret in the late fall, the night he took her to the horse races in London, to thank her for all her time and trouble. It was the first time in twelve years that they had been absolutely alone together, with no expectation of interruption. On the way home, after she told him he was more than welcome, he reminded her of all the years they had worked side by side and then without flinching he asked what she would think about getting married.

Margaret smoothed her silky skirt over her long legs and then reached to touch his arm. She told him yes, she thought that would be the best idea.

If anyone had wanted to know, Margaret would have said that she felt honoured to be asked into Bill’s life. There was that kind of formality around him now, maybe around any man in his position. But she would have said too that a man’s love for a woman should
get its start when the woman is young. She would have said that a man’s love for a woman past thirty, say, was in fact love for the younger, remembered woman, the feeling strengthened maybe with time and familiarity, but really and always, if you could strip away the time and familiarity, you would see it was the younger, remembered woman who was loved, the basic woman. She would have said that she believed this was one of the main differences between men and women, because you could begin to love a man any time.

After they’d got back to town, Bill had parked his car on the street and gone up the stairs with Margaret to her apartment above the Hydro office. She stood very still while he lifted her sweater over her head and unzipped the long silky skirt. She was wondering as she stood very still how she could possibly begin all this with him, the actual touching, the actual movements of intimacy. She was forty-one years old. A good part of her experience with men had been gained when she was quite young and, more recently, before the possibility of Bill Chambers, while the lovemaking in her narrow bed had been by necessity discreet, perhaps because it had been discreet and limited in possibility and self-contained in its secrecy, it had been, compared to this, now, dreamlike.
Like a dream.
This
now
was meant to be the pleasurable evidence not of a true, prohibited, longed-for love but of Bill’s plain desire that she should be with him in his life, through his life. She waited for her body to accept this difference. She relied on her instinct. Bill moved slowly, took them through it slowly. Her instinct told her to let him do this.